Japanese for complete beginners: where to start

Starting Japanese from zero, it's hard to know what comes first. Here is a simple order that gets you saying real sentences quickly.

1. Learn the sounds before anything else

Japanese has a small set of sounds, and almost every syllable is a consonant plus a vowel: ka, ki, ku, ke, ko. The five vowels are always pronounced the same way, roughly "ah, ee, oo, eh, oh". Once you can hear and say these sounds, every new word is just a short string of them.

Each sound is written with one hiragana character. You don't need to memorize the whole chart in one sitting; learning each character as you meet it in real words works well. The hiragana chart has audio for every sound.

2. Pick up everyday words

Start with concrete, everyday words: animals, family, food, places. They are easy to picture and you will use them in your first sentences. Remlori's first chapter teaches 93 of them, each with a picture built from its sounds:

ねこ neko · catたこ tako · octopusすし sushi · sushiわに wani · crocodileかめ kame · turtleみみ mimi · ear

3. Learn one polite sentence pattern

The single most useful pattern is [noun] desu: "it is [noun]". ねこです。 (Neko desu.) means "It's a cat." Polite Japanese like this is safe with anyone, so beginners usually learn it first. See desu.

4. Add the small words that glue sentences together

Japanese marks each word's role with a short particle after it. Three cover most beginner sentences:

• wa marks what you're talking about.
• wo marks the thing an action is done to.
• mo means "too" or "also".

Verbs go at the end of the sentence, and a polite verb ends in -masu.

5. Practise by building sentences, not just reading them

Reading a sentence and understanding it is much easier than producing one. Put sentences together yourself from the words you know, and say them out loud. Short daily sessions beat long weekly ones.

What to skip for now

• Kanji. They matter later, but you can learn to speak and read simple sentences in hiragana first.
• Casual and honorific speech. Learn polite desu/masu Japanese first; it is correct almost everywhere.
• Long word lists. A few hundred well-learned words get you much further than thousands half-remembered.